Yonit Shames
Published: March 8, 2006
It seems to be the trend nowadays to reduce extremely complex issues to black-and-white terms- to widespread public applause.
Most notably, President Bush received a great boost in public approval when he said, “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center.
As an American, you are either a bleeding-heart liberal or an insensitive conservative; you are either a gun-toting redneck or a vehemently anti-gun hippy.
The results of this type of narrow-minded thinking are still unfolding in Iraq and in the United States’ other global engagements, but they are also progressing at home.
Courtesy of South Dakota’s new anti-abortion law, which prohibits abortion without any exceptions for cases of incest and rape, the abortion controversy that has been a nationwide debate for decades has once again gained wide media coverage.
But another battle, one that has been quietly raging for five years, is making its way to center stage as well. The makers of the morning-after pill, a dose of hormones that a woman can take to prevent pregnancy after having unprotected sex, have repeatedly petitioned the Federal Drug Administration for over-the-counter status and have been repeatedly ignored and denied.
Two FDA advisory panels recommended that the drug become available over the counter, yet the FDA denied the petition again, citing concerns about the pill possibly increasing cases of unprotected sex among adolescents.
Studies since then have shown that the pill does not increase incidents of unprotected sex, and no fewer than 41 members of Congress requested that the FDA reconsider the petition. Doctors have stressed that the morning-after pill simply contains a higher dose of the hormones contained in birth control pills, which can actually be used as emergency contraception.
But over a year since the FDA promised to reconsider the case, the pill’s fate is still undecided.
Now the abortion fight is starting to simmer at the state level, and analysts think that laws like South Dakota’s are blatant, intentional challenges to Roe vs. Wade, which could be overturned.
At this time, it is more important than ever for both groups, both pro-life and pro-choice, to examine alternatives to abortion and start to figure out realistic ways to prevent it.
Yes, there is some controversy over the “life at conception” aspect of the morning-after pill, which prevents eggs from implanting into the uterus. But pro-life activists repeatedly decry the U.S.’s high abortion rate as wide-scale murder; shouldn’t people be willing to consider any alternatives to abortion, even if from a “lesser of two evils” perspective?
The fact is, black-and-white thinking, with its similarly all-or-nothing solutions, will not bring these rates down.
Preventing women from obtaining emergency contraception immediately after unprotected sex greatly increases their chances of pregnancy- and punishes them for things that are oftentimes not their faults. Condoms have a failure rate of 14 percent, and among the 680,000 women who are raped every year in the U.S., it is safe to say that at least a few hundred pregnancies result.
Perhaps compromise, in the form of allowing women the chance to prevent pregnancy before it occurs, could actually help us gain some ground in the fight for women’s rights- and in the fight against abortion.